Higher education has historically experienced only sustaining innovations. Most colleges and universities have focused their efforts on enhanced technology in teaching, improved classrooms, more faculty research, and better residence halls and dining facilities.

Such amenities add significant cost, leading to increasing prices; but these sustaining innovations do not necessarily help nonconsumers of higher education. Who are the nonconsumers? They include the nearly 71 percent of U.S. college-going students who do not participate in the residential college experience.

These potential students are looking for a different value proposition from higher education, one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, and identifiable skill sets that are portable and meaningful to employers. Despite these trends, few colleges or universities are changing their ways.

Online competency-based education can even out the playing field by taking students to the furthest point possible in their learning experiences, regardless of their starting point, race, geographical location, or family income. Online competency-based education can truly be the disruptive innovation for higher education.

IT manager Jason Smith needed a college degree. Desperately. Last November, the 29-year-old decided to go back to school. But his IT job made it hard for him to find time to study at a traditional college campus.Then he discovered a new online competency-based program offered by Western Governors University (WGU) in Utah.

Competency-based programs allow students to take courses online and at their own pace, often relying on work experience to save time. Instead of focusing on credit hours or seat time, these students progress by demonstrating their mastery of the subject, usually by taking a test or completing a project.

Most competency-based programs have a set fee for a certain period of time—usually two six-month periods. Students can enroll on the first day of any month and finish as many courses as they want within that time frame.

It’s a Mistake Not to Use Mistakes as Part of the Learning ProcessEdutopia

Teachers are expected to be mistake free. Administrators, parents, and even other teachers judge them very negatively for making mistakes. Yet when a teacher forms strong relationships with another teacher or two, they share their problems freely, ask for and give advice, and learn from each other.

What would happen if those pairs or threesomes expanded to include a small group of teachers, plus administrators, counselors, or even whole departments or entire school faculties?

An important side effect of discussing mistakes might be to change the perception of mistakes, not only for teachers, but for students as well. In the vast majority of classrooms, students are encouraged both formally and informally not to make mistakes. This belief system is absurd. Here are some things that we can do in the classroom to change this defeating way of thinking.

Personalized learning paths are nothing new; they were just invisible. Some educators have been capitalizing on the value of such learning through assessments for almost fifty years. Now, thanks to social networking, big-data analysis, the Internet,abundant content in multiple forms, we will be able to scale those personalized learning paths—to millions of learners in the coming era.

Personalized learning paths, designed to meet the needs and goals of each learner, can lead to a redefinition and a new understanding of lifelong learning to include informal as well as formal learning, delivered at scale.

These enablers give us the capacity to truly put the learner in the center and build programs around the learner's needs and requirements.

The use of personal technology devices in the classroom is prevalent at colleges and universities. Rather than embracing this trend, some faculty, departments and even entire institutions have started putting limitations on students’ use of personal technology in class.

While it is inevitable that students will be distracted at times, putting constraints on the use of personal technology devices will not solve this problem. Restricting use of devices in the classroom is moving away from the trend of improving education by integrating technology.

Here are five reasons why educational institutions should continue on that path instead of stepping back: Students are technology natives, they use e-books, students want streamlined organization...

The Babson Survey Research Group’s report on Open Educational Resources (OER) showed that few faculty members have actually heard about OER. Nearly 65.9 percent of the surveyed faculty members said they had either never heard of OER, or had heard some but didn’t know much about them. Only 5.1 percent of the faculty members said they were very aware of OER.

The OER movement has sprung up in response to the rising cost of higher education, and aims to curb one of the additional fees that sometimes take students by surprise once they make it to campus -- namely textbook prices.

More than half of the instructors said they were deterred by the lack of search tools or a comprehensive catalog of open resources. Those deterrents added up to a slight drop in discoverability.

According to a survey of 2358 teachers by the Flipped Learning Network and Sophia Learning, 33 percent of those teachers who are flipping their classes are math teachers, 38 percent are science teachers, and 23 percent teach English language arts and social studies.

But can you flip the other subjects? Can you flip an elementary classroom? The answer is a resounding yes. To flip the non-flippable classes, teachers need to ask this key question: What is the best use of my face-to-face time with students?

Though there is no one way to answer this question, there is a "wrong" answer: information dissemination.

If you are a sleep deprived teacher you may not be aware of the term woodpeckering, but you’ve probably done it. It happens the day following a bad night’s sleep. You’re sitting in a long meeting and you can barely keep your eyes open, so you prop your head up with your hand.

On average teachers get just six hours’ sleep a night, falling short of the most valuable sleep time. We need sleep to think clearly, react quickly, and create memories. It is during the later hours of sleep (especially between the sixth and eighth hour) that the brain has some its most profound insights and does some of its most creative problem solving.

Neurologist Judy Willis explains why this is detrimental and offers her general and teacher-specific tips on how to nod off with ease.